Meteor Crater, located near Winslow, Arizona, as photographed from the International Space Station. Also known as the Barringer Meteorite Crater, the 1186 m-diameter crater is approximately 180 metres deep and is surrounded by a rim of smashed and jumbled boulders, some as big as houses. The structure visible on the north side of the Crater is the Visitor's Centre. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst shared this image on Twitter.

Alexander Gerst is currently a member of the resident International Space Station Expedition 40 crew. He is spending five and a half months living and working on the ISS for his Blue Dot mission.

Using 200 million measurements collected by ESA’s CryoSat mission between January 2011 and January 2014, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany have discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking in volume by 125 cubic kilometres a year. The study, which was published in a paper published on 20 August 2014 in the European Geosciences Union’s Cryosphere journal, also showed that Greenland is losing about 375 cubic kilometres a year. Read full article.

Shortly before the docking of ATV Georges Lemaître on 12 August 2014, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst was pictured manually checking the approach speed of the massive cargo vessel. This failsafe method involves holding a simple plastic ruler against the screen and helps ensure a safe docking.

The ATV – Automated Transfer Vehicle – is designed to dock without human intervention. In the picture, ATV-5 is seen only a few short metres from the International Space Station. If ATV had approached too quickly, Alexander could have manually stopped the docking. The large red button seen on the docking control panel is the abort button. If used, it would send a signal to ATV to activate its thrusters, which would immediately push the vehicle away from the ISS. This is a critical moment during docking, and requires the human element to supervise the automated process.

ATV-5 made its docking at 15:30 CEST, with bull’s-eye precision and no need for any intervention. It is the last ATV to be sent to the International Space Station.

It will remain docked for about five months, providing supplies, fuel, air and scientific equipment and periodically reboosting the Station.

Scarring the southern highlands of Mars is one of the Solar System’s largest impact basins: Hellas, with a diameter of 2300 km and a depth of over 7 km.

tHellas is dfdf to have formed between 3.8 and 4.1 billion years ago, when a large asteroid hit the surface of Mars. Since its formation, Hellas has been subject to modification by the action of wind, ice, water and volcanic activity.

Impact craters have also since pock-marked this vast basin floor, two of which are the focus of this image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express on 17 December 2013. The ground resolution is about 15 metres per pixel.

These craters lie in the deepest, western portion of Hellas, and such a clear view is unusual because dust clouds typically obscure the basin floor. Indeed, this region seems to be covered by a thick blanket of dust.

The larger of the two craters is about 25 km across. A flow of material appears to have been transported from the top left of the scene and into the crater. Zooming in to the smooth mound and the area immediately around it reveals interesting textures that likely resulted from this flow.

Flow features are also seen outside of the craters, and in particular, at the centre left of the image near the top of the frame. Material also seems to have cascaded from the larger crater’s rim and into a neighbouring smaller crater, at the far left of the image.

The morphology of many features in the Hellas Basin and its surroundings strongly suggests the presence of ice and glaciers.

For example, in the foreground and around the crater rim, polygons of patterned ground are visible which indicates the presence of water – this pattern occurs when fine grained and porous wet soil freezes.

Indeed, in the deepest parts of the basin, the atmospheric pressure is about 89% higher than at the surface, which may even offer conditions suitable for water. Radar images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest that some craters in Hellas might contain water-ice glaciers several hundred metres thick, buried under layers of dust.

Saturn reigns supreme, encircled by its retinue of rings.
Although all four giant planets have ring systems, Saturn's is by far the most massive and impressive. Scientists are trying to understand why by studying how the rings have formed and how they have evolved over time.
Also seen in this image is Saturn's famous north polar vortex and hexagon.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 37 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 4 May 2014 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometres from Saturn. Image scale is 180 kilometres per pixel.The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

This stunning new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows part of the sky in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs).
Spiral galaxy NGC 4244, nicknamed the Silver Needle Galaxy spans some 65 000 light-years and lies around 13.5 million light-years away. It appears as a wafer-thin streak across the sky, with its loosely wound spiral arms hidden from view as we observe the galaxy side on. It is part of a group of galaxies known as the M94 Group.
Numerous bright clumps of gas can be seen scattered across its length, along with dark dust lanes surrounding the galaxy’s core. NGC 4244 also has a bright star cluster at its centre. Although we can make out the galaxy’s bright central region and star-spattered arms, we cannot see any more intricate structure due to the galaxy’s position; from Earth, we see it stretched out as a flattened streak across the sky.A number of different observations were pieced together to form this mosaic, and gaps in Hubble’s coverage have been filled in using ground-based data. The Hubble observations were taken as part of the GHOSTS survey, which is scanning nearby galaxies to explore how they and their stars formed to get a more complete view of the history of the Universe.

This stunning new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows part of the sky in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs).

Although this region of the sky is not home to any stellar heavyweights, being mostly filled with stars of average brightness, it does contain five Messier objects and numerous intriguing galaxies — including NGC 5195, a small barred spiral galaxy considered to be one of the most beautiful galaxies visible, and its nearby interacting partner the Whirlpool Galaxy (heic0506a). The quirky Sunflower Galaxy is another notable galaxy in this constellation, and is one of the largest and brightest edge-on galaxies in our skies.

Joining this host of characters is spiral galaxy NGC 4244, nicknamed the Silver Needle Galaxy, shown here in a new image from Hubble. This galaxy spans some 65 000 light-years and lies around 13.5 million light-years away. It appears as a wafer-thin streak across the sky, with its loosely wound spiral arms hidden from view as we observe the galaxy side on. It is part of a group of galaxies known as the M94 Group[1].

Numerous bright clumps of gas can be seen scattered across its length, along with dark dust lanes surrounding the galaxy’s core. NGC 4244 also has a bright star cluster at its centre. Although we can make out the galaxy’s bright central region and star-spattered arms, we cannot see any more intricate structure due to the galaxy’s position; from Earth, we see it stretched out as a flattened streak across the sky.

A number of different observations were pieced together to form this mosaic, and gaps in Hubble’s coverage have been filled in using ground-based data. The Hubble observations were taken as part of the GHOSTS survey, which is scanning nearby galaxies to explore how they and their stars formed to get a more complete view of the history of the Universe.